"Whatever they are"
A major highway improvement project is stalled because a colony of platypus is living in a creek along the road. Senator Bill Heffernan wants the road finished, but doesn’t regard the animals as worth holding up construction, although they are a protected species. Maybe he doesn’t think they’re real. Did I mention he’s a Liberal? Of course he is. Do any of them care for anything beyond the expedient?

More Dog-Whistling?
It’s true that here in New South Wales, the government already provides some funding for
But the federal government’s proposal to pay for school chaplains strikes me as requiring a jaundiced eye, if only because of the continuing controversy over Sheik Hilaly and the timing of Mr. Howard’s announcement. Although I’m sure the bill, should it be presented in Parliament, would make no distinction in religious persuasion, there is no more than the mere tradition of freedom of religion in Australia, and even that’s relatively modern. It seems quite clear that this is not much more than an attempt to “get ‘em young” and establish a state-sponsored theology. As one interlocutor on a previous thread expressed it, all religion is a means of repression, or can be at least, and especially when the state inserts itself into matters of faith. Schools have counsellors, but what if they become proselytizers, too? It’s issues like these that make the Greens and Democrats look so much better than the Opposition.

Discontinuing the Constitution
Now that George II can declare martial law anywhere and anytime, should we be concerned for the present restriction on holding the Oval Office to two terms? We’ve pretty much already lost Habeas Corpus, so if the Democrats fail to achieve a majority in either or both houses of Congress, can we expect Bush to resolve his Cheney problem (the guy’s never going to pass muster to run, medically) by opening the way to a third term? How far would he go – would he even suspend the 2008 election? More immediately: how does he keep getting away with this stuff?

Mufti Muff
It’s hardly on the same scale as a global religious leader denigrating the faith of millions, but at what point will the Islamic leadership learn that the world has changed, and women can dress as they please? I don’t care if Al Hilaly was sermonizing about fidelity and abstinence or not: this isn’t a Third World country (not that that matters), let alone the nineteenth century and he needs to get over it. If there isn’t any other more serious problem in Islam as a religious organization, globally or locally, it’s that the rest of the “leadership” can’t make idiots like this shut up and sit down.

Update: Deporting the creep doesn't appear to be an option, unless it can be shown that Al Hilaly has spoken to incite violence against women, and that would take a member of his congregation carrying out such a crime. Even then, it would probably be a stretch to prosecute the cleric. Really, his statement is not much more than the often-heard "she asked for it" vileness still perpetrated by more modern members of societies around the world, though no less deserving of condemnation.

Jiggity-Jig
Even as we speak, Mom & Dad are waiting in the airport (or possibly even on board the plane at this hour) to return to the U.S., although, due to the effects of time-travel, they are also already back in Los Angeles. Isn’t the International Dateline marvellous?

They’ve had a good trip, even if all they’ve seen has been Sydney and a bit of Canberra, and I think Dad feels a bit better than he may have previously about our move here four years ago, now that he’s seen the place. It is a beautiful country, with a fascinating history (that I’ve been pretty remiss in studying properly, at least its post-Federation story) and inexplicable wildlife. Why did Australia get all the marsupials except the North American possum (and why are our possums so different from the o- variety)? Why did the animals develop here they way they have with the absence of any major predators, the former thylacine notwithstanding? Why did Kerr really sack Whitlam? Some things we may never know.

While it’s my turn for an international jaunt, it will be a while yet before I accomplish it, barring any employment changes that offer me that opportunity, an eventuality now forestalled by six months, as I’ve taken up an extension to my contract here. I’d like to go back at some point, though maybe only once the Democrats are back in power.

Bizarre Food/Bizarre Ban
I’m no fan of Vegemite, but the ban on its importation – even going so far as having Customs agents preventing Australian tourists bringing the stuff in with their luggage – is just weird. Only breads and cereals can contain added folate (folic acid), a B vitamin, so Vegemite, which is mostly all about the B’s and high in folate, is illegal. What will Howard do? Can he get his mate, Bush, to rescind the ban? What will the ex-pat Aussies do? Hollywood better watch out, since they stand to lose a substantial amount of top talent when Russell Crowe, Naomi Watts, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, et al. all decide they can’t work without their yeast-extract breakfast spread.

Damn Tourists
It all goes well so far, with Mom & Dad safely ensconsed just up the road and having a fine time. We've been walking them off their feet pretty much daily, sometimes letting them have a bus tour to let them rest a little. We hit the foreshore first, of course, and down through the Rocks, and later in the week joined them for a Hunter Valley vineyard trip that really was very good. You never know, but Boutique Wine Tours went to a couple of good wineries, from which I brought home a couple of bottles of chardonney (well, I am a leftie, after all) I'm looking forward to with relish. Today, Dad and I did the Bridge Climb, which, regardless of the price, every tourist to Sydney ought to do, and probably most Sydneysiders, for that matter. We'll send them down to Canberra, soon, on their own, and I know they'll enjoy it, but most importantly, they went to the Blue Mountains yesterday. Now, apparently, Blue Mountains Cultural Tours" are relatively new, but we chose them because Mom made the trip west last year and we thought something different from that tour would be a good idea, and these guys did the Jenolan Caves as well as the usual Three Sisters stuff. But now I can never allow them back in the country. I've been here four years, and they're in the country for four days when they see a platypus. I haven't seen one, and it's been a goal of mine from the day I first heard such creatures existed. It's just not fair. After they've gone, I'm going to have to head up to the Blue Lake and spend as long as it takes. I can't let them get away with it.

Making Water
Are we really on the verge of running out of drinking water? Years of drought and wasteful utilisation practices and other forms of mismanagement suggest it’s true. More dams won’t help, but conservation will. There are studies, there are recommendations, which, if implemented, would improve the situation, if not resolve it. We hear about these things only occasionally, and usually as exceptions, such as this or that farmer who’s managed to defeat soil salinity or the city that’s implemented a wetlands rainwater purification catchment system. There’s plenty more that could be done, products and systems installed to directly conserve water as well as indirectly. Energy production isn’t just a matter of petroleum, you know. Water plays a significant role. Everything every ordinary person can do to reduce energy consumption and water utilisation is worth doing. Year by year, the world goes into “ecological debt” sooner and sooner. I once heard it speculated that the next global conflict would not be over land or oil but water, and even considering the present conflicts in the Middle East, there’s a good deal of truth in it. Who controls the Jordan, who controls the Tigris and Euphrates? Major sources of fresh water in specific regions of desert, and the nations in conflict with one another and themselves. Will Tasmanian exports do the trick?

This Has Been a Test . . . in the Event of a Real Emergency. . . .
We’ve known that North Korea had nukes for a long time now, so the test they conducted shouldn’t be a surprise, any more so than their previous ballistic missile attempt. Everybody treats North Korea like they’re the village idiots: unpredictable, probably dangerous, but not terribly bright. A recent Robert Kaplan article in the Atlantic Monthly outlines why that kind of thinking is what’s dangerous about North Korea and takes a more forward-looking view of the eventual, inevitable collapse of the Pyongyang regime. Validation of their nuclear capacity does make the situation more immediate to the world, if no more destablising to the region than Pakistan and India trading tests was not so long ago. China does need to take more of a hand than they’ve been seen to do up to now, but in the end, North Korea seems less likely to launch a war than to leverage foreign aid and an increased period for the Kim family to hold power. We should, however, keep our heads as we work out what to do in response to the test. North Korean claims must be assessed with as much accuracy as possible. Already there appear to be reports that seismology reports are conflicting. While that doesn’t make the prospect of their atomic weapons capacity any less, it does raise some interesting questions about their claims in general and in some specifics. Was it a “neutron” device, designed for high radioactivity and a lower blast, for example.

Wringing It
O.k., so, not in the air. It seems somebody gained a day instead of losing one, and that, along with perhaps some additional math problems, have left the parental units still at home, peacefully regarding their impending departure, while I paced the bloody airport wondering what Qantas had done with my parents. No harm done, of course, as luckily the itinerary we'd planned for them had some flex. I guess I might as well go to the office tomorrow and finish one or two things I'd put on hold.

Winging It
Mom and Dad are in the air and on their way to Sydney. For Mom, it's her second trip, but Dad's coming because her first trip sounded good enough to endure the 20+ hours in the arms of Qantas. Plus, he can't let her have done a Bridge Climb and not have done it himself, so I'll be on my third go. It's a lot of fun, and I never remember the answers to any of the quizzes. Is it a million rivets or ten million? (I don't think the Bridge Climb staff really know, either.) There are a few things they have to see and I hope we can make them happen: a platypus (or platypussery, anyway), a kookaburra, and, of course, kangaroos in the wild. You can't come to Australia and settle for zoo 'roos, can you?

Let Loose the Dogs of Culture War
Earlier this week, Prime Minister John Howard gave a little speech commemorating the start-up of Quadrant, a dull, vapid opinion journal dedicated to the proposition that conservative values are only those that serve a reactionary agenda and in full opposition to any suggestion of merit in more inclusive government policies because those are only ever communism and we know about Joseph Stalin, don’t we? Now, while it’s true that from the time of the Soviet revolution and on into the ‘fifties and ‘sixites, many far-left opinions were supportive of a regime that didn’t deserve support, that ignores other, more majority-representative opinions on the left, that the arms race, for example, endangered us all, or that a policy of open engagement rather than punitive sanctions and sphere-of-influence interventionism would better (or at least equally) serve to bring about positive change in Eastern Europe, as Gorbachev’s own policies toward the end of the Cold War proved. But never mind all that, because it’s too late. School funding, Mr. Howard not long ago proposed, should be based on schools having a flagpole and flying the national flag. And teachers are evil ideologues because they oppose Mr. Howard’s policies towards the elimination of the social safety net and the gutting of Medicare. Socialist policies from a previous government driven from office by its inability to get a budget passed to pay for it, and socialism is really just communism that’s been run through the wash. And universities are hotbeds of communism, all those Red professors with tenure left over from that now discredited era still peddling their pernicious ideas like “think for yourself” and equality for women and homosexuals and ethnic minorities. Even worse, some people have the unmitigated gall to suggest that we ought to consider the institutional abuses of the past as wrong, that we should apologize for them – because they didn’t really happen, as has been proven by revisionist historians (on the basis of incorrectly cited footnotes in the work of a few other historians claiming such abuses did indeed happen). So the Minister for Education, Julie Bishop, now proposes that the Federal government should take the responsibility for setting the basic educational curriculum away from the states and territories. Really, it’s all part of Mr. Howard’s strategy to eliminate federalism in Australia, which is a petulant reaction to the fact that the states and territories are governed by the opposition party. That there are – if there are – first-year law students taking remedial English (and if that’s due to some failure from their primary or secondary school years) – is not a result of ideological pedantry “straight from Chairman Mao”, as anyone familiar with the educational system can tell you, but that the system is overwhelmed, insufficiently funded, and as a result allowing kids to slip through. It’s not the curriculum, and it’s not the teachers, it’s the system, as we lefties have often had cause to point out, and unless the system is fixed, it will continue to happen. It doesn’t matter if you teach revisionist history or accurate history, whether you teach British literature or internationally sourced books, or even if same-sex parenting gets a look-in on Playschool: if the system can’t supply sufficient funding so that students get the support they need, kids will continue to progress without learning. Better pay for teachers, and not fatuous merit schemes, and more school funding (so that teachers aren’t paying for supplies from their own pockets, for one thing), would do more to attract better teachers and to keep them in the system, first of all. More and better teachers would allow more and better attention to the children. Let’s stop pretending that the curriculum is controlled by the politics of individual teachers, when what you really object to is the governments running the schools. More dog-whistle politics, whipping up the forces of division.

Abuse
Mark Foley has plenty to be ashamed of, apparently, including his lawyer, who is now offering his client’s own history of childhood abuse and sexual orientation as something like an excuse. Frankly, the latter is largely irrelevant, except in which pages would have been subjected to harassment, and the latter is only relevant insofar as it underscores why such abuse is so serious. It seems, however, that Rep. Foley wasn’t so much a perpetrator of abuse as just a creep, although that doesn’t make his actions any less improper or potentially harassing. And there’s the real issue to be addressed.

Guidelines for addressing sexual harassment are well-established in the States at this point. Most large businesses (and many small ones) have set forth policies and procedures for handling complaints, and they’re based on laws and regulations and court case precedents and EEOC-issued policy papers. For any Federal government body to fail in its duty is indicative of a serious failure of oversight. It was bad enough that we had the embarrassing admissions of the Lewinsky affair, but there’s considerable room in that incident for it to have been a matter of censure rather than a full-blown case of workplace harassment. No such leeway is evident here, particularly in the actions of the Speaker of the House.

If it’s true that he knew of Foley’s actions in 2005 and did nothing, then he would be at fault, just as liable to redress as Foley himself. Although Congresspersons are essentially independent contractors, that they identify with a party and work therein according to party directives and discipline under the supervision of the Speaker makes them functionally employees, and their employers have a responsibility hierarchically to ensure they act according to ethical standards.

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert will have violated those ethics by failing to take the matter with due seriousness to the same degree and in the same kind as Foley’s actions have done. He should step down immediately pending the outcome of a properly conducted DOJ investigation.

Colossus
Independent bookstores struggle, and it’s no surprise. But for all the convenience of and discounts from the on-line retailers, sometimes a bookstore is the only way to get what you want, especially if what you want is the experience of searching for an unspecified something to read, or, as the soon-to-close Coliseum Books did for me, when you need something that only an overstuffed store will allow to stay on its shelf. That’s how I ended up with a complete set of the Martin Beck mysteries years after I’d first encountered >The Laughing Policeman. It was also my bookstore, while the rest of my NYC family had Scribners or Brentano’s or (before it was a chain) Barnes & Noble. My first job in the city was just a couple of blocks away, so I spent many more lunch hours there than was good for my take-home pay. I’m sorry their shutting up, and I’m sure there will be others who are, too.